To See the Moon Again (33 page)

She checked the clock. Carmen wasn't even close to half done with the test by now. Julia suddenly realized she ought to eat something since she'd had nothing but two cups of coffee early that morning. She found a small container of leftover chicken salad in the refrigerator and ate it on a few crackers, then washed it down with a glass of ginger ale. She tried to do the crossword puzzle in the newspaper but couldn't concentrate. Besides, Carmen liked to do the puzzle. She would save it for her.

•   •   •

S
HE
walked from the kitchen back through the hallway again. All the closets and cupboards and drawers were sorted and straightened. All the laundry was done, all the housework caught up. She couldn't work outside in the rain. Carmen had the car, so she couldn't go to the grocery store even if she needed to, which she didn't. She returned to the kitchen.

She thought of calling Marcy Kingsley. They had talked several times since Christmas, mostly about things going on at Millard-Temple. Old Dr. Kohler had died in her sleep over Christmas break, so Marcy had been asked to teach her two Shakespeare classes this semester, on top of her regular British Literature classes. Dean Moorehead's wife had fallen coming down their back steps and broken both wrists. That Vera person, the adjunct professor filling in for Harry Tobias, had been asked to stay on next year and develop some new graduate courses in psychology. And Julia's classes were smaller this year, which Marcy interpreted as “everybody's waiting till you come back in the fall.” Marcy was always upbeat, and, unlike Pamela, didn't get testy if Julia suddenly wanted to end the conversation. She picked up the phone to dial her number, but then remembered what day it was. Marcy taught all day on Wednesdays.

She put down the phone and looked around. There was another idea, of course. A quiet, rainy day would be perfect for writing. Over the past month or so, she had cautiously, secretly begun writing a story about a husband and wife drifting apart, adding only a few sentences at a time so as not to let it get ahead of what she felt rising slowly within her—hope maybe, and the beginnings of confidence. She liked it so far. She didn't know where it would lead, but she was determined to follow. Perhaps her strongest motivation was a recent thought: that fiction writers could, in a sense, revise the mistakes of their past through their stories.

But she knew writing was out of the question today. Her mind was too scattered. She might get stuck, and then discouragement would undo her.

It suddenly hit her that part of the problem right now was that it was too quiet in the house. That she hadn't thought to put on any music or turn on the radio was proof that she had not been thinking straight today. She went back to the living room and looked through the CDs. Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Beethoven, Handel, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev—none of them seemed right for a rainy day when she couldn't sit still. She needed something to take her far away from the stone house, the musical equivalent of a cyclone to blow her from Kansas to Oz. And then she saw it. The CD titled
Space for All
, which included everything from Holst's
The Planets
to John Williams's
Star Wars
to Rimsky-Korsakov's
Dance of the Comets
. That should do it.

And almost simultaneously, she had another thought. Her eyes swept across the wall of bookshelves. She had cleaned and reorganized every inch of the house except, for some strange reason, these bookshelves. It was enough to make her laugh. It was almost enough to give rise to a Carmen-like thought:
This was a task especially reserved for today, forgotten until you needed it most.
Well, if that was so, why hadn't it come to her earlier, before she started prowling around in the girl's bedroom?

She put the
Space
CD on, then stood back and studied the bookshelves again. This would be a good time to weed out some of these things. She would work from left to right, top to bottom. Just like reading a book.

•   •   •

T
HREE
weeks later, a few days before Easter, Julia was looking through the freezer for a package of lunch meat when Carmen came in from the backyard. “
Look
what I found,” she said. “Did you know these were back there? Do you know what they're called?”

Julia stopped rummaging and turned to look. It took a moment to call up the name. “Lily of the valley,” she said. “I had forgotten all about them.” It came back to her now, one of those scenes still lodged in the recesses of her mind, still capable of rising from the dead, so to speak, making it hard to keep breathing normally, also making her wish once again that she had a different kind of memory than the one she had. People with bad memories were spared so much. She turned back to the freezer and aimlessly moved a few things around.

Matthew had shown her the picture in a plant catalog—a whole bed of lily of the valley nestled beside a walkway—then had gone on at some length about how his grandmother used to grow them in her little patch of a flower garden in Tennessee, about how pretty they would be in early spring if he planted some in their own backyard.

Like so many other times, Julia had listened without responding. One thing she had learned long ago was that Matthew could talk on and on, especially if someone acted too interested in what he was saying. He could be almost as excitable as a woman, remarking on common things you saw every day. “Whoa, look at that cardinal on the fence—such a big guy!” he might say. Later in the day she might see him sitting on the back step putting a new switch on her bedside lamp, and she would feel a brief stirring of pity and gratitude for all the small kindnesses he did, for which he must know by now he would receive no thanks.

He had ordered the lily of the valley from the catalog—pips, he had called them, not bulbs—and when they arrived, he went on at length about the chance he was taking, since South Carolina wasn't the ideal growing zone, though they should do all right along the creek bank in the partial shade and good rich soil, moist enough but not too moist, and so forth and so on. She was glad when he had finally stopped talking and gone outside to plant them.

But Julia had never seen them in bloom, hadn't given them a thought since the day he planted them, whenever that was.

She heard the clink of glass and looked back to see Carmen stooped in front of the cupboard under the sink, where all the vases were kept. “I don't see how anybody could forget about these,” the girl said, laughing. “Have you ever
smelled
them?” She took out a small blue cream pitcher, filled it with water, and brought the flowers over to Julia.

Julia leaned close and breathed in, then shook her head in wonder. “No, I would remember that.” She stared at the tiny bell-like blooms. It seemed impossible that so much fragrance could come from flowers no bigger than pearls. And equally impossible that she wouldn't know that something so exquisite was growing in her backyard. It must have been one of the last things Matthew had planted, now that she thought about it, maybe even on the same day he collapsed in the flower bed. If that was so, they would have bloomed last spring. But, of course, she hadn't been in her right mind last spring, going through the motions of teaching, trying to imagine how she would survive a sabbatical. No doubt she had been unaware of a lot more than the lily of the valley quietly opening along the bank of the creek.

Carmen set the flowers in the kitchen window. “I do believe these are the last ones, though,” she said. “A lot of them are already dried up. I can't believe I missed them. They must not bloom very long.”

Ah, yes, Julia thought, another metaphor for the way life works. You wake up too late to find you missed something good, or almost missed it. She closed the freezer door hard. “I know I bought some sliced turkey and ham, but I can't find it,” she said. “Want to walk over to Del's with me and get a sandwich?” It was well past one o'clock, late for lunch. Maybe that was why she felt so cranky all of a sudden. Driving would be faster, but the walk would do her good and it would allow a little more time for Del's to clear out from the lunch crowd, if there was one today. With spring break starting tomorrow, maybe the students were already on their way to the beach or wherever it was they were going to waste their time and money.

Carmen glanced at the clock. “You mean right now?”

“Right now,” Julia said. “I'm hungry. Are you?”

Carmen shrugged. “Well, okay, I guess I could eat a sandwich.”

“We can decide what to do about supper later,” Julia said.

As if meal schedules were of any importance to Carmen. Julia didn't know what or when the girl had eaten today, only that she had been down on her knees with a bucket of sudsy water scrubbing the floor when Julia had come into the kitchen that morning for her first cup of coffee. The whole house smelled like Pine-Sol. A little later she had seen her in the driveway examining an old bicycle—a rusted relic she had pulled out of the loft in the garage.

•   •   •

C
AN
we go this way?” Carmen said when they got to the end of the driveway. She pointed left. That would mean taking the long way to Del's, but it was okay. Walks with Carmen didn't happen that often. Besides, there was no pressing business to get back to.

They headed west on Ivy Dale, soon passing the house with the wide porch and all the wind chimes. There wasn't much breeze today, however. A man was sitting on the porch, tipped back on the rear legs of a ladder-back chair. He had on an old hat, pulled down low. He looked like he was asleep, but then he dipped his head and touched the brim of his hat.

“Has she made you another one of those pies yet?” Carmen called. “Naw,” came the answer. His wife made good sweet potato pies, she explained to Julia. Then, from the man, “You heard back yet from that test you took?” Carmen told him the scores still weren't posted. “Shouldn't be long now,” she said.

A little later she said to a woman watering a plant, “Is it hot enough for you?” The woman called Carmen “darling,” told her they were predicting upper eighties on Easter Sunday, said it was way too early for that.

Approaching the Presbyterian church, they heard the children before they saw them. “Those are the K–4 kids,” Carmen said. “They play outdoors after rest time.”

Julia laughed. “Do you know the whole day's schedule?”

“Pretty much,” Carmen said. “Sometimes they mess me up, though, and switch things around, like on the days they have group chapel.”

Julia couldn't help wondering what the Presbyterians did for “group chapel” with children so young, what with all the whining and wiggling around and such. Would there be a sermonette? A catechism drill?

Carmen was still talking. “. . . and some of them get picked up at twelve thirty. But a lot of them stay all day. A different group of fours come after lunch for an afternoon session. And it's not just babysitting either—they teach them all kinds of things. It's like real school.” She had obviously hung around here a good bit. More evidence that she had another life besides the one she lived with Julia in the stone house. “They're smart kids, too,” she said. “One of the teachers told me she was showing the threes and fours a video not long ago and needed to pause it. She was fumbling around with the remote when the little boy sitting next to her leaned over and said, ‘Just push the button with the parallel lines on it.'”

They turned by the church to cut back through the neighborhood and head in the direction of Millard-Temple. They could see the playground now, and they slowed as they passed it. A little boy close to the fence waved at Carmen, then pointed to Julia and asked, “Who's she?”

“My aunt,” Carmen said. “Do you have an aunt?”

“Aunt Penny,” he said. “She's fat.”

“I'll bet she has a nice, soft lap, doesn't she?” Carmen said.

“She doesn't have a lap,” he said gravely. He waved again and took off for the swings.

They continued on their way. “How many two-year-olds are there?” Julia asked at length.

“Seventeen,” said Carmen. “Cute kids.” Then, half a block later, “No, not a single one can hold a candle to her.”

F
ULL
IN
A
D
IFFERENT
W
AY

As Julia had hoped, Del's Deli was almost empty. At a table by the door, a boy sat by himself, his eyes glued to the screen of his laptop. At another table, two girls were laughing as they gathered up their trash to leave. Julia recognized one of them as the student who had made an F in Creative Writing a couple of years earlier, something that rarely happened, even to those with the imagination of a boulder. The girl glanced at Julia, then stopped laughing and ducked her head quickly.

Julia suggested ordering a whole sub and splitting it, to which Carmen replied, “Hey, yeah, cool, no problem, like, let's split, L-O-L, you know, dude?” an obvious reference to a recent comment of Julia's about the sloppy vocabulary of so many young people today.

They ordered, got their drinks, and found a table.

“New paintings,” Julia said, looking around. “I think I'll digest my food better today.”

Carmen nodded. “These were left over from the midyear art show.” She pointed to a picture near their table. “This is my favorite. This guy is really good. He won some kind of big prize at a juried show in Charleston.”

It was quite a large piece, a backyard scene—toys scattered across the grass, a hound sleeping under a tree, a rusting swing set, clothes hanging on a sagging clothesline, an overgrown vegetable garden beyond, with a few pie tins strung around it.

“Imagine that,” Julia said. “Something you can actually recognize. Obviously the product of a dull, limited mind.”

Carmen caught the irony. “For real. He must be such an embarrassment to the art department.”

As they ate, Julia looked around at the other paintings. More representational pieces than usual. She wondered what it meant. Was there a new wind blowing through the art world? If so, she might start going to student art shows again. Not that she thought realism was always best, not at all. Many of her favorite pieces were abstracts, but not the bleak, random, angst-ridden things she saw so often these days—ugly stuff she didn't want to look at, much less buy and hang on her wall. Not an opinion she would ever voice on campus, though, for no professor wanted to be stuck with the leprous label of “traditionalist,” especially in the arts. Heaven forbid that you should prefer performances where you saw or heard something hopeful, something you understood.

She looked again at the painting of the backyard. It was obvious that the artist had a fine eye for proportion, perspective, line, color. Not anything she would want to take home, though. All those signs of a tired, broken-down life—why would she want to look at that every day?

“I wish I could live there,” Carmen said. She was still studying the painting. She took a small bite of her sandwich and chewed awhile. “I don't know why I like old things so much. But that right there is the kind of life I've always dreamed about.”

The girl didn't sound like she was teasing, but with her you never knew. “What kinds of dreams?” Julia said. “Good ones? Or bad?”

Carmen didn't laugh. “You know for sure that the woman who looks out her kitchen window and sees a yard like that has a very full life.”

“Then I guess my life is very empty,” Julia said.

Carmen looked at her. “No, I didn't mean that. Not everybody wants a life like that. Your life is full in a different way. And I like your house anyway. I have dreams about it, too, sometimes. Good ones.”

“It's fine,” Julia said. The kind of vague comment that could mean almost anything. What she meant, she supposed, was that her own life was fine, Carmen's dream was fine, and everything in between the two was fine.

•   •   •

L
OOKING
away, Carmen spoke to the opposite wall. “Yesterday morning at the grocery store,” she said, “I was in line behind this woman. There was a baby in the buggy gnawing on a box of animal crackers and two other little kids standing behind her fiddling with all the candy bars and gum in the rack. Her buggy was jammed full—cereal and diapers and milk and apple juice and all the rest of it. I started thinking about her older kids coming home from school in the afternoon and her husband coming home from work, and she'd be getting supper ready—maybe hot dogs and baked beans or chicken legs and mashed potatoes—and then they'd all sit down and eat together and everybody would be talking at the same time and one of the kids would spill something and the baby would make them all laugh, and then they'd all pitch in and clear the table, and . . .” She stopped and looked back at Julia. “Well, I guess it must sound like a pretty silly dream to you.”

Julia shook her head. “I wouldn't call it silly.” How could she say this next part tactfully? It was something that needed to be said. Carmen was twenty-one, not twelve. It was surprising, distressing really, that someone with her background could still be so emotionally young. It struck her as a sad, willful kind of blindness. All these months they had spent together, and Julia still hadn't taught her much that really mattered.

She proceeded carefully. “Any dream has a way of . . . growing old when it becomes reality. The romance fades. That woman you saw in the grocery store is probably dreaming of a different kind of life than the one she has.” She gestured toward the painting. “And the one looking out that window probably wishes some magician would show up and get the laundry off the line and cook supper and give her money to buy a decent swing set.” She went on for a little while longer until she realized she was repeating herself.

Carmen was listening politely. How could it be, Julia wondered, that the words she was saying—words she knew in her heart to be true—sounded so empty and unconvincing, even to herself? And what a conversation to be having in Del's Deli anyway. She came to the end of a sentence and stopped. No one else was in the shop now. The boy behind the counter had disappeared into the back.

Carmen ate a few chips. “Did I tell you there was a job opening on the yard crew on campus? I talked to the man in charge the other day. I might apply for it when I get my test scores back.”

Yard crew? Julia thought. Why did the girl keep talking about applying for jobs instead of for college? Here was something else that needed to be said—again. Somebody with Carmen's mind needed at least a master's degree. She could major in anything she wanted to, ace any course, from math to music.

But just as Julia opened her mouth to speak, two boys entered the deli. One of them, a dark handsome kid in a pair of plaid pants, was talking quite loudly: “And so he tells me to mind my own . . .” He stopped long enough to yank the cord of the cowbell just inside the door and say, “Hey, hey, here we are, everybody, now the fun can start,” before picking back up with “. . . mind my own business, and I tell him it sort of
is
my business, see, since that's my dad's car he just rear-ended, and he says . . .”

He broke off suddenly and struck a pose like a lookout sentry. “Hark, is that really Charmin' Carmen sitting over there?” The other boy, tall and thin, looked over at Carmen and waved.

They walked over to say hello, the dark-haired boy talking the whole time, pausing only long enough for Carmen's introduction. The boys' names were Hardy and Joe Leonard, she told Julia, and their gospel quartet sang at her church sometimes. When she introduced Julia as “my aunt, Dr. Julia Rich,” Hardy, the dark-haired kid, said he was glad to meet her because he'd been wanting to ask a doctor about a pain in his gall bladder.

Hardy was like a very immature, very smart, very hyperactive child. Besides his plaid pants, he was wearing a T-shirt with a faded picture of Beaver Cleaver on the front. Around his neck was a long chain with a collection of dog tags on it. Literal dog tags. One of them read,
My name is Sydney. Please return me.
There was a phone number, too.

Julia had fallen into the habit of sizing up every boy she saw these days as a potential match for Carmen. She sincerely hoped the girl wasn't interested in this one, though. The other one was better, though it was odd to see a college boy who still blushed as he did when he cleared his throat and said to her, “Dr. Rich? Are you the one who teaches Creative Writing at Millard-Temple? I think my girlfriend was in your class last year. She really liked it.” His ears were bright pink by the time he finished. Julia asked what his girlfriend's name was, and he proudly said, “Kelly Kovatch.”

“Yes, I know her,” Julia said. “A nice girl and a very good writer.”

His whole face turned pink.

“Hey, now, you've gone and embarrassed my bud here,” Hardy said, laughing as he clapped Joe Leonard on the back. “Joe Leo's trying to convince me to transfer to Mill-Temp next year, so he's been showing me around campus today. And, say, I like to write! Who knows, I might be in one of your classes next fall.”

Julia could only hope that wouldn't happen. She couldn't imagine being able to concentrate with a boy like him in class.

“How's your grandmother?” Carmen asked Joe Leonard. To Julia she said, “Joe Leonard's grandmother is one in a million. She came to our church to hear them sing one time.”

“She's doing fine,” Joe Leonard said. “My parents are going to take her to Atlanta to a Braves game for her birthday. She's hoping to catch a foul ball.”

Hardy started telling a story about Joe Leonard's grandmother, something that involved a bag of popcorn on an escalator at the mall, but he was laughing so hard Julia didn't catch half of what he was saying. After that he said he knew a joke that would “curl your hair,” but then he looked at Carmen and said, “Oh, wait, you must've already heard it, like, a thousand times.” By the time the boys went to order their food, Julia felt like she had been in a crowded room pulsing with strobe lights and loud rock music.

“Hardy is a great guy but totally out of his mind,” Carmen said, in a tone that bordered on fond.

“Does he have a girlfriend?” Julia asked.

To her relief, Carmen nodded. “He's engaged to a girl in Mississippi.”

Julia gave Hardy another long look from across the room. On second thought, he might actually be fun to have in class. After all, she knew by now that a student's appearance wasn't a reliable indicator of how well he wrote. Hardy might just write the kind of wacky but insightful stories that could take your breath away.

And he sang in a gospel quartet—that was what Carmen had said. Julia was almost curious enough to want to hear it.

•   •   •

O
NE
Saturday in early May, Julia hurried in through the front door with two bags of groceries and took them to the kitchen. She left the car running in the circular drive since she was headed back out to buy a wedding gift for Marcy Kingsley's son. As she set the groceries on the kitchen counter, she heard Carmen playing her guitar and singing out on the back porch.

So this must be the song she had finally decided to sing in church tomorrow. She had been practicing several all week, but she kept coming back to this one—“What Wondrous Love Is This.”

Sweet
was the only word to describe Carmen's singing voice. The high notes floated light and easy and landed right on pitch, and the low notes were smooth and sure. A very natural voice, never breathy, never showy. Very little vibrato. Like clean, pure water. It was a voice Julia could listen to all day.

She stood very still so she could hear the words. The song was slow and measured, the chords changing frequently. Carmen was near the end now. “
And when from death I'm free, I'll sing and joyful be, And through eternity I'll sing on, I'll sing on, And through eternity I'll sing on.
” The last note died away and all was quiet. Such a strange combination—happy words sung in a minor key, slowly.

With the car still running, Julia had meant to take time only to put the milk away, but she found herself reaching into one of the bags and pulling out the first thing her hand touched. A box of grits. She set it on the counter. Maybe if she waited just a moment or two, Carmen would sing again. But she didn't. The back door opened and the girl entered the kitchen, whistling. “Oh, hi, Aunt Julia, I didn't know you were back already.” She ambled over to the sink.

Julia looked down at the box of grits. “I'm not staying. I'm just dropping some things off. But look what I did—I just noticed. I bought instant instead of regular.”

Carmen shrugged. “That's okay, they'll just cook faster.” She got a juice glass out of the cupboard. “Did you hear the joke about the undertaker? He took all the ashes from the cremations and sent them to the cannibals so they could have Instant People for breakfast.”

“That's an old one,” Julia said. She took the milk to the refrigerator.

Carmen filled the glass with water, then drank half of it and stopped. “Guess what?” She started drinking again.